CSI: Chumbolone

Mob's cop gets 12 years, place in lexicon

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Here's the most amazing thing about Anthony "Twan" Doyle, the ex-Chicago cop who was just sentenced to a dozen years in prison as part of Operation Family Secrets: He was a sleeper agent for the Outfit who worked in CPD's evidence section and, according to testimony cited by John Kass, "was willing to help destroy crucial DNA murder evidence."

"And that if this evidence was lost," Kass writes, "it would have effectively killed the case that solved 18 mob homicides and sent two Outfit bosses and a hit man to prison."

The mob placed Doyle on the inside not just as a conduit for information but as a safeguard against the very kind of prosecution that did him and his minders in.

"Outfit helpers like Doyle, placed in sensitive government posts, in politics, in law enforcement, in the judiciary, in city inspection and business licensing bureaucracies, have long allowed the Outfit to form the base of the iron triangle that runs things," Kass wrote earlier this week.

Tribune reporter Jeff Coen, who has a new book out about the Family Secrets case, told Kass that "Doyle was one of the most interesting aspects of the case. Here you have a police officer as a mole telling the Outfit when evidence in a murder was being sought by the FBI. I don't think the public is aware of the effort that goes into placing people in low-key clerical positions that give them great access, people that can fly under the radar."

Doyle's personal story is a rich in itself. "Doyle, who changed his last name from Passafume so he would appear to be Irish, joined the historically-Irish Chicago Police Department merely as a cover for his role in the mob, according to prosecutors," ABC7 reported.

"Doyle tried to cultivate sympathy by making himself out as a poor Chicago kid who began his public service career pushing Streets and Sanitation trash carts to help his family and from there worked his way up to a beat cop," Chuck Goudie reported.

The reality was much different.

"Even while he was a Chicago cop, Doyle made regular visits to a Michigan prison where he fed police information to convicted Outfit hit man Frank Calabrese Sr.," Goudie reports, adding that "the beefy Doyle moonlighted as an enforcer, [a] mob 'street tax' collector."

His nickname, Twan, "either refers to a slang version of Anthony or a Chinese donut popular in the 26th Street neighborhoods where Doyle ran." (Kass described him as a "messenger boy for the Chinatown crew.")

But Doyle will be most remembered for bringing squarely into the Chicago lexicon a word that Kass has fallen in love with: Chumbolone. Meaning, basically, a chump. Or as Doyle himself testified, "an idiot, stupid.">

Doyle's lawyer denied his client was a sleeper agent, and instead said he was an excellent cop. his defense, Doyle told the court "he allowed himself to be used by former friends."

But even under that charitable reading, he would be the chumbulone now.>